Rasa’s comment > Likes and Comments

I don’t think I can answer this with a single book. The thing is that there’s more than one axis on which you judge books, including your own, as you imply yourself.

Mostly when I look back at mine – and I’m proud of them all – there are bits, of different amounts and to different degrees, that I would do differently. Bits I’d rewrite, the occasional bit that makes me laugh or maybe even wince. The only book that within its own terms does exactly what I want, without a line I can think of that I’d want to change, is The City & The City. (Please note I really don’t mean to imply that I think it’s a Perfect Book, only that it does what I wanted it to do in a way that feels as seamless to me as anything I’ve written.) So taking that as a criterion for ‘best’, I think that may be, within those terms, my ‘best’ book.

Iron Council is a book in which I can still see various flaws, things I’d tweak, things that may not work, and so on. But at the same time it came up from quite deep in me and expresses some things that matter to me very much in a more intense and unmediated way than perhaps any of the others – and I don’t just mean thematically, but in terms of prose and language. So I think perhaps it means the most to me of all the books.

And then Embassytown is the book that I worked on longer than any other, and that has been the one I’ve agonized over most, to get right. It’s probably the book that I think is most ambitious, and that I may be proudest of.

So the answer tends to oscillate between these three, depending on the moment and the exact terms under discussion.

You are one really weird dude. When I first read Perdido, I couldn't believe it. What amazes me is how you create these worlds that make sense but are so arcane. I think that Embassytown was incredible and it really makes sense to me that you would pursue a PhD in economics. My question is simply "what are you planning? What is your goal?"

Just testing this here.